Community Health Practitioners and Child Sexual Abuse in the Family, 1970s-2010s

“It's a work of brilliant and empathetic scholarship that is sensitive and brave in equal measure, that will shape the field for years to come.”

—Tracey Loughran , Professor of History, University of Essex, UK

“Beecher sensitively explores children’s disclosures of abuse and the lack of culture change within community health that has made responding so inadequate.”

— Lucy Delap , Professor in Modern British and Gender History, University of Cambridge, UK

“Relevant, accessible, and significant, this book delivers an unmistakable message: we can, and must, do better. As a survivor of child sexual abuse within the family, this book offers hope for a better way forward”

— Sophie Olson , survivor activist and author, UK

This open access book is an innovative history of community health practitioners’ responses to the seemingly intractable problem of men (and on rare occasions, women) sexually abusing children within the private family home. It is situated within a social history of the development of British community-based health professions in the last decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on archival research and newly gathered in-depth oral history interviews, the monograph argues that expectations placed upon community-based doctors, nurses and mental health staff since the 1980s in relation to predicting and preventing the sexual abuse of children by men they know are incongruous. Beneath a surface acquiescence to the need to protect children from such abuse or to intervene early lie cultural, social and structural barriers that prevent its fulfilment. The book is a first in specifically interrogating the recent history of the role of community health practitioners within the modern 'child protection workforce', and contributes to growing scholarship on the history of emotions in the medical professions.

Ruth Beecher is Senior Research Fellow in Modern History at Birkbeck, University of London, UK.